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John Irving wears his literary celebrity as a valued inheritance, an accessory worthy of his elevated status as one of the greatest living novelists in the English-speaking world.

The leonine features and elegant mane of silver hair, the downturned mouth, the penetrating black eyes, spectacles perched at a rakish angle across the tip of his nose, the long, considered responses to every question — both trivial and imposing — provide a composite portrait of self satisfaction, the picture of a man who is what he always imagined he’d become.

Irving took a stab at humility, nevertheless, during a recent interview in the Toronto office of his publisher, where he was installed for a two-day siege by Canadian media eager to grill him about his 13th novel, the sexually charged, 427-page first-person epic, In One Person.

“One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are,” Irving began.

“Regardless of the process, which is familiar to me now, and perhaps because I write all my drafts in longhand, I’m always acutely aware that the page knows nothing of me and my previous work, and that every new sentence has to stand on its own. I like the anonymity of that encounter. It always feels like the first time.

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“Once I’m finished, of course, I realize how often I have repeated myself, and how much of what went before has found its way into the new novel.”

Not complacent, not arrogant or churlish, as some would have us believe, but enviably comfortable in his skin, Irving, who turns 70 this year and is still regarded generally by women as one awesome hunk of heterosexual masculinity, seems perfectly aware he has taken on one of the toughest challenges any writer could invent, by assuming the voice of a bisexual male exploring a world of unfulfilled love in In One Person, perhaps the year’s most anticipated work of fiction.

Not surprisingly, it’s a world that Irving’s legions of readers will find familiar, loaded with lovable New England eccentrics, neglected children inventing wildly rich realities out of their secret desires, wrestlers and small-town actors, the mysterious intricacies of the German language, Shakespeare and Madame Bovary, adventures in Vienna, all-boys’ prep schools, cross-dressers, peripheral skirmishes with the movie business, sudden shocks and random devastation, incest and other kinds of unorthodox sex — a double dose this time, as the book’s central character, Billy Abbott, bounces between an apparently endless series of crushes, not relationships, from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s, with both men and women.

“Billy’s a real sexual outsider, another of my misfits, really out there, I thought, until I stopped to remember that Jenny Fields (mother of the protagonist in Irving’s first novel, the runaway 1978 bestseller The World According to Garp) had sex just once, with a comatose man, then gave it up for life, and that Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules (1985) did the same thing — one bout with a prostitute, then complete abstinence,” said Irving, who keeps an apartment in Toronto, home town of his second wife, literary agent Janet Turnbull, a cottage on Georgian Bay in northern Ontario, and a home in Vermont, where In One Person is set.

“Johnny Wheelwright in A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) never has sex at all, and is labeled a ‘non-practising homosexual.’ They all made more radical decisions than the one Billy made — to enjoy sex equally with men and women.”

“I don’t know why, but I seem to prefer the first-person voice — as opposed to third-person omniscient, where the narrator is relatively distant, and knows everything that’s going on — when I’m dealing with sexually taboo subjects, as I did with Johnny Wheelwright in Owen Meany, and John Berry, the narrator of Hotel New Hampshire, who’s in love with his sister, and now Billy, who’s in love with everyone.

“Sometimes you just need the confessional tone of the first-person narrative. Then you can be one of the players as well, rather than just the observer.”

In One Person was fully formed in Irving’s mind 12 years ago, but he didn’t start putting it to paper till June, 2009, he said. And though Billy isn’t based on a specific real-life character, he isn’t wholly imagined, either.

“A bisexual boy was easier to imagine than any other of the characters in the book, and I felt quite unconstrained. Once you become one of the actors, you know how the voice sounds. And once I knew what Billy desired, I knew who he is.

“I’ve known many bisexual guys — my generation, older and younger — and I find they’re generally very self-confident people, because they don’t come with a support group. Most straight men distrust bisexual males, regard them as just gay men who haven’t come out, and most straight women view them as completely untrustworthy because they’re open to temptation from both sides of the sexual divide.

“The truth is, bi- guys are everywhere, walking a pretty solitary road. Though it wasn’t planned, Billy’s only real heroes are the two transgendered men who book-end his story. Their existence is even lonelier, and they’re even more distrusted, misunderstood and marginalized by gays and straights alike.”

Some readers will feel little sympathy for Billy, who’s perfectly content with his string of sexual adventures and romantic flings, and apparently incapable of commitment and a stable relationship.

In Irving’s formative years in the 1950s, monogamy was “a life sentence, another form of villainy” he said.

An accidental pregnancy and the consequential necessary marriage during his college years made him feel like “the unluckiest guy in the world,” until fatherhood saved him from the Vietnam draft in 1965.

“I’d already done officer training. I would have been part of that war except for my son, who’s in his late 40s now. Suddenly I wasn’t so unlucky. Boy, was I wrong.”

Hailed in advance bulletins as a “profoundly political novel,” In One Person exudes a rage that targets human rather than institutional or ideological failings. Moving inexorably towards the AIDS horror in the early 1980s, Billy’s story takes on extraordinary political gravitas when reactions to the suffering caused by the disease begin to redefine notions of tolerance.

“When I finished writing Garp I naïvely believed I would never have to deal with this subject again, that intolerance of our sexual differences would soon be a thing of the past,” Irving said.

“All these years later, sexual animosity is still with us, even though In One Person is much more realistic and gentle account of intolerance than the radical and cynical satire in Garp.

“Maybe the reason this novel sat around for seven or eight years is that I was hoping we’d got past this stuff, maybe we were moving towards acceptance of people as they are or who they want to be sexually.

“But there’s still so much entrenched resistance to acceptance of minority sexual identities. Look at all the Republicans running for the presidential nomination — homophobes every one, as well as anti-abortion and anti-gay rights. And I’ve only just heard about the mayor’s (Rob Ford) refusal to take part in Gay Pride events here. The sniff of disapproval is everywhere. It’s a failure of sympathy.”

No great fan of the modern novel, Irving admitted that the contemporaries he admires most — Umberto Ecco, Salman Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Günter Grass, Michael Ondaatje — have 19th-century perspectives on story-telling.

“They might be writing about contemporary subjects, but they’re doing it with long, narrative, plotted, character-driven, passage-of-time novels,” he said.

And despite the layered complexity and stories-within-stories that characterize his own work, it’s always the ending — specifically, the very last line — that’s the starting point of all Irving’s novels.

“How can you foreshadow what’s going to happen if you don’t know the ending?” he asked. “I always make a roadmap in reverse. The last line is the jewel in the crown, and most often it’s a refrain, some phrase that keeps cropping up throughout the novel.

“It’s no different in In One Person, where the reader is reminded that we don’t have the right to hang labels on others in order to consign them to some convenient hole where they can be forgotten and dismissed.”

Is there anything in human nature of which John Irving is intolerant?

“I’m intolerant of the same thing that Billy is — intolerance,” he answered.

“As many times as I’ve seen The Merchant of Venice, I always take Shylock’s side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He’s treated cruelly. And it’s tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him.

“I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It’s when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.”

See the Star’s review of In One Person in the book section Sunday, May 13th.

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